The energy and excitement is building for Devoxx US 2017 in San Jose!

As the Devoxx US conference approaches, I am not only excited about presenting Watson to such an eminent audience, but also looking forward to attending sessions on cutting edge technologies by industry leaders such as Arun Gupta, Venkat Subramaniam, Brian Kane, Josh Long, Marcus Hirt, James Strachan… The list of great speakers is soooo long!

The best part of any Devoxx conference is the creative energy you feel around you and while interacting with the speakers and attendees. Many presenters have created the languages and/or the technologies they are speaking about. You can’t be more of an expert then that. And as a track lead for the Devoxx program committee, I got to participate in the demanding selection process to ensure that you get the best and brightest of the Devoxx community, presenting to you. The Devoxx US program team ranked all proposals in committees and then gave Golden Tickets to preeminent members of the community to weigh in on their favorite sessions. We received over 750 proposals by the October 12 Call for Papers deadline and whittled the final presentations down to 150 or so presentations. And we also chose a variety of sessions across organizations to keep the conference as vendor-neutral as possible.

As the track lead for the Devoxx Future submissions, I got a chance to review some really cool AI, machine learning and big data proposals that I’m sure you’ll enjoy at Devoxx US. Beyond the future technologies sessions, I have also penciled in a slew of sessions focused on Docker, containers and Kubernetes that I want to attend and personally need to learn more about for IBM.

And did you hear that the Devoxx US keynotes were just announced? I am so excited about hearing Janelle Klein, who is going to share her research on building a human brain simulator. Olivier Gevaert, applies “Deep Learning to Biomedicine” at Stanford University School of Medicine and will be discussing the use of TensorFlow machine learning and deep learning for cancer treatments. Not to mention Brian Kane (creator of the “Billy Bass Alexa Hack”) who will be presenting on how AI impacts design, connected devices and customer experiences.

I am truly looking forward to meeting so many bright and committed developers out in San Jose come March 21 to 23. I remember how vibrant the atmosphere was at DevoxxBe and I’m excited to share that excitement here at the US event. Because there’s nothing better than offering our knowledge and expertise amongst other like-minded developers in the community.